Word.ws English Dictionary

busy as a nailer

busy as a nailer adjective: working constantly.

Adjective

busy as a nailer (not comparable)

  1. (Ireland, dated, idiomatic, simile) working constantly.
    • So the Colonel went down stairs, and the Ould Fellow worked away as busy as a nailer, shovellin' in the guineas by hundherds and thousands.1832 Samuel Lover "The Devil's Mill" Legends and Stories of Ireland (Dublin: Wakeman) 2nd ed., p. 139
    • The result was obvious; the nailer was no longer “as busy as a nailer,” and there was no prospect that he ever would be fully employed.1888, Pennsylvania Secretary of Internal Affairs, Bureau of Industrial Statistics; Annual Report for 1887 (Harrisburg: E. K. Meyers) "G: The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers" p. 24

Questions about busy as a nailer

What does busy as a nailer mean?
Busy as a nailer means working constantly.
What part of speech is busy as a nailer?
Busy as a nailer is an adjective.

Words near busy as a nailer in the dictionary

  1. busy
  2. busy around
  3. busy as a beaver
  4. busy as a bee
  5. busy as a dyke in a hardware store
  6. busy as a nailer
  7. busy as a one-armed paper hanger
  8. busy as a one-armed paperhanger
  9. busy beaver
  10. busy beaver function
  11. busy beaver functions

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: busy as a nailer (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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